Install Windows Phone 7 Metro UI on Apple iPhone with OS7

We love the Windows Phone 7 Metro UI for its unique look and very convenient usability of its live tiles that deviate from the previously established norm of smartphones just having grids of icons or at the most, widgets to let users interact with them. You can now get the same interface for the home screen of your jailbroken iPhone with the OS7 theme.

OS7 is a Windows Phone 7 Metro UI theme for Apple iPhone that brings the live tiles and pinned program tiles interface to the home screen of your iPhone. It looks surprisingly like the original Windows Phone 7 interface and by just looking at the screen, one can’t even easily tell if it’s an iPhone running it. While it will not bring the metro UI to every element of your iPhone, it will give you a home screen with live as well as pinned program tiles, along with an alphabetically organized list of your apps and settings the Windows Phone 7 way rather than the iOS way.

The live tiles provided with the theme work perfectly, including contacts, weather, photos, clock, calendar and more. More tiles can be pinned by tapping and holding on any app from the program list and selecting ‘Pin to Start Menu’. Pinned tiles can be unpinned with similar ease by tapping and holding on them and selecting ‘Unpin’. The app comes with plenty of icons for a lot of iPhone apps already built in.

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The theme is currently in public beta 2 and is available for free while in beta stage. If you want to support the developer, you are encouraged to donate to him. Those who donate will get the donate button removed from the theme. Once a final version is released, it is intended to be prices at $0.99, which is dirt cheap considering the looks and functionality it brings to the iPhone user interface.

If you want to get on with installing this theme to your iPhone, here are the instructions.

Requirements:

You must have a jailbroken iPhone for this theme to work.

You must also have Cydia installed.

Lastly, you must have Backboard installed from Cydia.

Procedure:

You must first install the public beta 1 of the theme before you can update it to the current public beta 2. Here is how to install the public beta 1:

Launch Backboard and create a ‘Default’ backup.

Launch the Safari on your iPhone, open this page and click this link to download the theme.

Tap ‘Yes’ and wait patiently while the theme downloads.

In Backboard, select ‘OS7’ and tap ‘Install’.

Wait for the theme to finish installing, tap ‘Respring’ and you’re done.

Now to install public beta 2, you must follow either the automatic method or the manual one.

Automatic Method: Open this page in Safari on your iPhone and click this link to download and install the public beta 2 via Backboard.

Manual Method: Download this file to your computer, extract its contents to a folder and from the extracted files, SSH the contents of the ‘Libraries’ folder from the extracted files to your iPhone’s ‘/Library/MobileSubstrate/DynamicLibraries/’ folder. Overwrite any files previously there.

That’s pretty much all there is to it – you should now be running the Windows Phone 7 Metro UI on your iPhone. In case of any issues, head over to the thread at ModMyi forums and contact the developer.